You can’t stand out if you’re trying to be like everyone else

A few years ago one of the
sort-of-fact-based channels (TLC, Discovery in its many forms, History,
A&E, National Geographic, even the Weather Channel now that NBC has gotten
its hooks into it) had a show about fishing. It proved popular. Soon, everyone
had some kind of show about fishing. (More, if we throw in that non-fishing
show about the anti-whaling terrorists – and yeah, they're terrorists, even if
they're terrorists with whose goals you agree.)

Then there was some show about
hillbillies. Now there are a whole bunch of them, some based on moonshine
production, some based on cutting down trees, some – many – based on catching
reptiles in the South.

Soon some network will drop the
pretense and come out with a show called "Stump-toothed In-bred Morons You're
Better Than." It probably will feature mountain men who get all likkered up on
moonshine and head down to the creek to fish for alligators with Honey Boo Boo
for bait. In every case, the insertion of phony nicknames and ginned-up
conflicts is necessary. It's important when invading the lives of people
producers think are lesser than themselves to build around those people a
morality play in support of the producers' fantasies of superiority.

I digress. The point is that once one
network does one of these shows, the rest will follow, doing basically the same
show. Then there are the "reality" shows that have nothing at all to do with
reality. They are largely scripted, featuring non-actors in contrived
situations.

Fine. That's television. It's not supposed
to be real. Fair enough – but this is happening elsewhere, too, this desire to
homogenize things, to establish "diversity" by imitation.

It has happened on the Internet, too,
in the silly business of "social media." Here's an example:

Facebook's chief operating officer is a
woman named Sheryl Sandberg. She has written a book, "Lean In," which is basically about how cool it is to be Sheryl
Sandberg. That's fine. I'd write a book about how cool it is to be me, if it
were cool to be me or I could at least convince a publisher that it were.
Sandberg has been a Facebook executive since 2008, which is to say since before
its (brief, we can hope) time as flavor of the month. She is cool.

Last summer, the
once-a-contender-but-fading-fast Yahoo! got itself Marissa Mayer to be its
chief executive officer. (The imitation has gotten to where executives now must
have the same first and last initials, it seems.)

Marissa Mayer took office, issued an
edict that all those Yahoo! people who were allowed to work at home must now
work at the office or be fired, then said she would be going home now to have a
baby. She had the baby, came back to work, and the baby is being raised in a
nursery next to her office. I did not make any of that up.

But Marissa is no Sheryl. Sheryl is
running the hottest property on the Internet right now, is published, is respected,
is cool. Marissa, a slightly pudgy blonde lifetime geek girl with a tin ear, is
running some backwater Internet also-ran. What to do?

Poor Marissa is doing the thing someone
who isn't but desperately wants to be cool always does: imitate those who are
the real thing. So she has decided to homogenize the various Yahoo! properties,
and buy some more, and homogenize them, in a pitiful attempt to be like
Facebook.

She spent $1.1 billion of other
people's money to buy Tumblr, a cool-until-acquired-by-Yahoo! site made up in
large part (though not entirely) of pornography copied from other sites. (It
does have other stuff, and lots of it, but the porn is always nearby.) Without
any warning to or consultation with its 80 million registered members (many of whom
paid for the service), she converted Flickr, the Internet's premier photo
display site, into a Facebook-ish, Tumblr-ish thing that resembles Windows 8 in
both appearance and user backlash. People's carefully constructed sets and
picture stories were all piled into one big lump, without their permission.
Hello, Flick/Tumbl/r, one of the Internet's top-20 Facebook imitators.

And in case she had missed pissing off
anyone, she announced at the big Flickr redesign rollout last week that "there's really no
such thing as professional photographers anymore." No, just underage drinkers
who want to post many fuzzy pieces of evidence that cell phones aren't very
good cameras.

The nonexistent professional photographers
fled en masse, many to a small but lovely site located in France called
ipernity.com, whose staff of seven has been overwhelmed but has manged
throughout to be calm, welcoming, friendly, and responsive, and they and their
site are cool – in short, everything the new Yahoo! ain't. And the ipernity.com
people will grow rich because they are who they are, not people trying to
appear cool by trying to be something they're not.

That's the lesson, I think: imitation is an
admission that you think you're behind, that you think whatever you are or have
or produce isn't quite enough. And in the cases cited, the admission seems to
be an accurate one.

You can't homogenize your way to success
unless you're a dairy.

Editor's note:
Dennis E. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before
moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. His column appears on
Mondays. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.